[ovs-discuss] coexistence of ofproto-dpif and customized ofproto provider

[Wuhongning]

if we have a hardware chip with rich networking feature, and want to expose as a enhanced flow switch. at the same time, we also want to keep the standard ovs, so what's the best practice to let them work together without bother each other?

basically, we don't want to touch the original vswitchd daemon, so we will add another daemon, for example, eswd, and let eswd running with vswitchd separately.


the question is:

1) is it possible for two daomon running together, if only vswitchd will manager the standard kernel datapath module? (eswd has its own dpif provider embedded in the daemon)?

2) can we just reuse the default open_vswitch db schema?  for example just add a new datapath type  “mynps”, and new interface types? will the native vswitchd automatically omit unknown datapath types, given the chance to my own eswd to manager these dadapath
tables?

3) if the answer is no to above, can we let the ovsdb server mount two different db schema, exposing two different listen port, and let vswitchd and eswd connect to different target, also with ovs-vsctl to connect different target?